Author:Anita Desai
Like so many other young Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s, Matteo leaves home to search for spiritual enlightenment in the ashrams of India. He believes he finds it at the feet of 'the Mother', but down-to-earth Sophie, who accompanies him, does not find her inspiring so much as mysterious, and decides to trace the Mother's own story - from her travels with an Indian dance troupe in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India.
A beautiful book of epic scope... Anita Desai has surpassed her own previous high standards
—— Literary ReviewFull of revelations and pleasures
—— Independent on SundayShe writes an extraordinarily delicate, lucid English... She is a writer's writer in that anyone who has ever set pen to paper must ask himself just what it is about the writing that makes it so memorable
—— Victoria Glendinning , Times Literary SupplementSuperbly powerful... A rich, evocative book
—— SpectatorLike all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious
—— Terry Eagleton , StandPaul Durcan has a great comic gift
—— Colb Toibin , Sunday IndependentBy universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James
—— Harold BloomHis mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance
—— Independent